Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

Impounding government funds, check.

Using CBP (ICE) against US citizens, check.

Assassinating Iranian officials, check.

Tariffs, check.

For power plants, this is glacial. A power grid has to balanced perfectly on a sub-second level. Also, you can only do this down to about 50% of rated capacity. Below that you have to switch it off completely.

If you combine this with renewable generation, it all falls apart. A cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop generation much faster than nuclear plants will ever be able to follow (by increasing generation). So if you want to have a substantial share of renewable generation (which, remember, is the cheap stuff), you can't have more than a token nuclear capacity, because you need to invest the money you might want to spend on nuclear on battery and hydro storage.

The other aspect is the economics of nuclear itself. Nuclear power plants are the most capital intensive generation capacity you can build. Even when driving them at the maximum of their rated capacity, the have a levelized cost of electricity several times that of PV and Wind per kwh. Requiring routine load following for nuclear would basically guarantee that no one ever builds a nuclear reactor again.

There are reasons to build new nuclear, but it's not cheap/reliable power generation. You build it to have access to a nuclear industrial base, as well as the research and professional community to run a military nuclear program. Or you actually succeed in creating a Small Modular Reactor, which might be suitable for niche applications (i.e. power isolated communities in extreme remote locations). Or you are simply fascinated by the technology and want to invest a ton of money on the off chance that it will produce some unforeseen technological breakthrough (though arguably you'd do better with investing in nuclear fusion from my limited understanding of the research).

I notice that all the recent finds on sodir.no are close to existing fields, like 5km, or even in existing fields. My friend who told me this works in strange places, far from existing infrastructure. I assume there are different kinds of equipment, and he was talking about his kind, and I understood it to be more general.

The EU has collectively added 27 Gwh of battery capacity in 2025 alone. If Spain only needs anything close to 2 GW of load for around 2 hours in the morning and evening each, this seems to be inherently achievable.

> you totally can, and for keeping the grid stable, they are absolutely grand.

Nuclear plants can load follow at about 5% of their rated capacity per minute. This is glacial in the world of electricity.

At the moment, this would theoretically work, because you have gas peaker plants that can adjust much faster and pick up the slack while nuclear plants come up (or down) to speed.

But countries like Spain and Denmark want to have a 100% renewable grid within two decades (much shorter than the typical lifetime of a nuclear reactor). So gas peaker plants are increasingly not an option.

The reality of the grid at that point will be a lot of wind and PV capacity (because it is dirt cheap). Nuclear is not compatible with those on its own, because a cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop power much quicker than nuclear will be able to follow.

Of course you can build a ton of batteries to act as a buffer. And guess what, that's exactly what we are doing right now. But at that point, why do we need nuclear again? Simply building batteries is already much cheaper than building a substantial nuclear generation capacity and while batteries will continue to become cheaper while nuclear won't.

Also, if you require new nuclear plants to load follow on a regular basis, it completely destroys the already bad economics of the technology. You need to run those at capacity continuously to make even remotely sense.